The present invention relates to an interactive promotional system wherein promotional materials can be created from previously prepared trailers, teasers, television and radio commercials, critical acclaim reports, print media advertisements and film/video clips matching particular attributes chosen by the user.
Pre-releases of certain film/video scenes are important to the success of the film/video upon release. It is therefore very common to prepare and distribute specific scenes or highlights (clips) to various media outlets prior to the release of a film/video. Select portions of a larger video and/or audio recording are termed “clips”. It would be advantageous to provide promotional material specifically prepared for the local, or ancillary, target audience. This targeting could greatly enhance the effectiveness of the advertisement. Editing is a time consuming task thereby hampering efforts to create targeted promotional material. Particularly, it would be very difficult to prepare all of the various tailored promotional materials necessary for the many locations and diverse target audiences. This task is better suited for ancillary or local advertising groups. Local, or ancillary, advertising groups do not typically have the capability, or desire, to create tailored promotionals due to the time consumption and lack of resources.
Once a film/video has become popular certain scenes may again become valuable for advertisers seeking to sell merchandise. For example, it may be valuable to utilize a scene/clip, or spoken line, from a well-known film/video in advertisements of commercial goods. It is often difficult to obtain such scenes, or lines, efficiently due to the time consuming task of editing. Automatic editing is available yet this lacks the specificity necessary to select scenes based on embedded information such as location, props, actors or actresses, etc.
Editing methods are well known in the industry. Automatic editing is described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,195,458. Editing can be accomplished by utilization of a time stamp wherein the frames are sequenced to the time stamp such as described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,330,004. Editing by displaying images in hierarchical order is described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,327,420. Methods of manipulating the image are provided in U.S. Pat. No. 6,249,280. Other editing methods are described in, for example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,134,380; 6,154,601; 6,285,361 and 6,292,620. Creation of a database comprising scene information is described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,537,528 and 6,192,183. A method for correlating image, text and audio data is provided in U.S. Pat. No. 6,172,675.
While there are a myriad of editing techniques none of these provide a typical user with the ability to efficiently prepare promotional material tailored to a target audience.
There has been a long felt desire for a system capable of allowing a user to interactively prepare promotional material/clips efficiently.